Anyone who understands computer architecture knows that the basic unit of storage in memory is a byte. A byte consists of eight bits of information. A bit of information is represented by a binary 1 or 0. Therefore, a byte is a string of eight bits that spans from 00000000 to 11111111 in binary representation, which corresponds to 0 to 255 in a decimal representation. There are exactly 256 combinations of eight 1's and 0's that can be combined to form one byte.
If you open this document in electronic form using what is known as a hexadecimal (“hex”) reader you would see an array of two-letter strings. Normally, you would see the equivalent alphabetic translations of the strings to the right of the array. The two-letter strings are the hexadecimal representation of the characters in the document. The equivalent alphabetic translations are known as ACSII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Hexadecimal is a compact way of showing the content of bytes. Each character of the hex string consists of either a number from 0-9 or an alphabetic character from A-F. The letter “N”, for example, is represented by the hex string 4E. In binary, this hex string is represented by 01001110. Likewise the letter “n” is represented by the hex string 6E. In binary this hex string is represented by 01101110.
Furthermore, anyone who understands gambling understands its simplest form—flipping a coin. There is a 50% chance that the coin will come up as heads and a 50% chance that the coin will come up as tails. If you assign a binary “1” to heads (H) and a binary “0” to tails (T), then flipping a coin eight times will give you a string that is a random combination of eight 1's and/or 0's. Suppose, for example, that this random string is H-T-H-T-T-H-H-T, which corresponds to 10100110 in binary and A6 in hexadecimal. However, using this type of manual system to generate a random number string is not practical for use in automated and electronic systems or in systems requiring long random strings on the order of thousands of bits.